Rumbled.

Posted by Lucy Robinson at 11:00 on 5 Mar 2010

• Print
• Share
• Comment

So we have completed one out of two experiments. The results are in; I speak like honeymonster but I am not too bad. I'm happy with this. Stephen and I are now homies and my self-esteem has been left reasonably intact.

But Experiment One - aka, Is my Judgement Shabby? - is still at large. The problem is, it can't happen until someone emails me via the online dating site. It's been quiet on there of late. Men who internet date are very seasonal. There's a flurry of activity round Christmas when they are bored at their parents' and then another one in January when they make a New Year's resolution to get themselves a woman. By March they are fed up of it and then it doesn't pick up again until July when they want someone to snog randily in the park.

Anyway, someone did email me a few days ago, and sent me quite a good message. Hey up, I thought, here we go! Experiment One is on the road! YEAH! Soon I'll have all the answers to my dating problems and then I will be ready to turn into a professional dating fiend! I will date a different batchelor each night at London's most fashionable locations, I will wear spikey heels and slinky dresses, I will have men howling at my door and maybe, God forbid, I'll even get my leg over one day.

Not so much, it seems.

When I replied to this man, he took 24 hours to then write back. I was a little taken aback by his message: "Er, are you Lucy Robinson?"

What the blazes...? What the... What the HELL? How has this happened! How did he work it out? (Naturally I use a different name on said dating website.)

"Er, Robinson, because of your picture on Marie Claire?" said my friend Jane. "But I've got sunglasses on," I yelled. "And I am drunk and I look like a troll in that picture. Surely no one would recognise me from that?"

She gave me a withering glance. (I hope the glance didn't mean "you always look like a troll who is drunk.")

I polled a few friends. "Does that picture on my blog look like me?" The responses were unanimously ‘Yes, you moron," apart from my dear friend Matthew who replied saying "No, you're better in real life, you like quite fat and stupid in that photo." Thanks, Matthew.)

There was only one thing for it: a photoshoot with my clever friend Eva who is a professional photographer. I summonsed her to my workplace, climbed a ladder on to the roof and for 30 minutes I felt like an actual model (conveniently forgetting the fact that I like to eat carbohydrate and thus will never be a model.) I gave her a rather ridiculous brief: "Please make me look smoking hot. And not fat or drunk or stupid. Oh and by the way, you can't actually show my face."

So I hereby present my new profile shot. I think she has done an excellent job. With the sun burning out behind my hair I like to think that it is reminiscent of Kiera Knightly and Matthew Macfayden in the final scene of the Pride and Prej film when they're snogging blissfully in a dewy meadow with the sun streaming through between their faces. The fact that I do not look like Kiera Knightly, that I am standing against a slimy brick wall in Camden rather than a dewy meadow, that I do not have a life of sex with Matthew Macfayden ahead of me - indeed that I currently do not have a life of sex with anyone ahead of me - all of these details are of course irrelevant.

The honeymonster's search continues. Stephen, meanwhile, is presumably dating you lot.

• Next entry
• Previous entry